While at school, he was considered unpopular and occasionally bullied due to his short stature, which led him to develop an overtly aggressive demeanor and a Napoleon complex.

Gordon insisted on his innocence, claiming that he had only pleaded guilty because his girlfriend threatened to break up with him if he didn't, and that his sister had made the accusation up.

According to her testimony, Gordon became easily irritable, got angry at the smallest inconvenience, threatened to commit suicide and even hire a hitman in order to get himself killed for a life insurance policy.

In August 2001, he changed the license plates of his car and repainted it in turquoise, then walked unnoticed to a church in Riverside, where his ex-wife and daughter were.

[4] Gordon was paroled in February 2010, but was forbidden from approaching his family or places where children gathered, and had to wear an ankle bracelet monitor.

[4] After his release, Gordon contacted Ian Pummell, his supervisor, and using the fact that they were friendly during his incarceration, he was offered a job at a local auto shop.

[2] In 2006, Cano was caught molesting his nine-year-old niece during a visit to his relatives' house to play video games, after which they called the police.

After serving 16 months, Cano was paroled in October 2009, and like Gordon, was prohibited from approaching both his relatives and children and had to wear an ankle bracelet monitor.

[5] This stemmed from an investigation launched on March 14 of that year, after local police received a call from a recycling center whose employees had discovered the body of a woman among a pile of trash on a conveyor belt.

[6] During the investigation, police examined a number of items found on the conveyor belt near Estepp's corpse, which had allegedly been dumped with her into a dumpster.

On the day Estepp's corpse was supposedly dumped inside, the man was installing windows on a storefront next to the auto shop where Steven Gordon worked.

[8] Based on this and data provided by the cell phone signals from the missing women's devices, both men were arrested, but denied responsibility.

Not long after, investigators from Anaheim and Santa Ana organized searches to find the bodies of Vargas, Anaya and Jackson, which were thought to have been dumped in that same dumpster, but they proved unsuccessful.

[9] In late April 2014, during an interrogation that lasted more than 13 hours, Gordon confessed to committing five murders, but as he could not remember the fifth victim's name, her identity could not be established.

[10] Initially, he provided investigators with two different versions of how things had transpired: in the first one, he insisted that he premeditated the killings and that Cano had minimal involvement, as he did not know what would happen once they got into the car.

This time, he told investigators that the pair would stalk various areas in Santa Ana and Anaheim in search of prostitutes, then analyzed methods to successfully kidnap and kill them.

Supposedly, Cano hid in the back seat, and when she entered the car, he held her at gunpoint and allowed Gordon to drive to the vacant lot.

[9] Gordon claimed that in order to cover-up their crime, they stripped Jackson's body naked and thoroughly washed it before destroying her clothing and personal items.

[14] The prosecution's main evidence at trial were the DNA test conducted on Estepp's body; computer records of the ankle bracelet monitor information and a print of the text messages exchanged with Cano, during which the pair discussed their victims, as well as how to kidnap and murder them.

After the proceedings, several of them told reporters that they could not comprehend the pair's motives to commit the crimes, while Estepp's mother, Jodi Estepp-Pier, said that she was unmoved by Gordon's apology.